IF YOU PICK UP A YOUNG BABY AND STICK YOUR TONGUE out at her, at some point she will stick her tongue out at you. It is as if you two are having a nice little social interaction. Her behavior is not learned. She appears to be automatically imitating your action and as a result appears to be engaging you socially. You may not think this is high-level communication, but maybe it is. When this clicks in, a baby has looked at you, recognized you as imitable (that is, as an animate object rather than a lamp), saw your tongue, recognized that she has a tongue, figured out, from of all her muscles that she has control of, which one is the tongue, and out it goes! She is a baby! How does she know a tongue is a tongue—or does she? How does she know how to use the neural system that is in charge of the tongue and move it? Why does she even bother doing it?
Babies first enter the social world through imitation. They understand they are like other people and imitate human actions, but not those of objects.1 This is because the human brain has specific neural circuits for identifying biological motion and inanimate object motion, along with specific circuits to identify faces and facial movement.2 A baby cannot do much to enter the social world and form a link with another person before she can sit up, control her head, or talk. But she can imitate. When you hold a baby, what links the two of you together in the social world are her imitative actions. She doesn’t just lie there like a lump of lead but responds in a way that you can relate to.
In the last chapter, I left off suggesting that responsibility arises out of social interaction and that the mind constrains the brain. We are now going to see how we incorporate social dynamics into personal choice, how we figure out the intentions, emotions, and goals of others in order to survive, and understand how social process constrains individual minds. Thinking that individuals are constrained by social process is a rather irksome topic to Americans. After all, we are a country that has favored rugged individuality, told a whole generation to strike out on their own with the headlines, “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN, GO WEST!” and made an icon of the lone cowboy. It was reported that when Henry Ford was told “Mr. Ford, a man, Charles Lindbergh just flew over the Atlantic Ocean by himself” he replied, “That’s nothing. Tell me when a committee flies over.” Our individualist thinking has actually influenced how we have approached and what we have focused on while studying humans and brain function. Thus, we do know a lot about the psychology of the individual, but we are just now understanding the neuroscience of the influences of social interactions.
Standard Equipment: Born to Be Social
It turns out that we are wired from birth for social interactions. A great many of our social abilities come hardwired from the baby factory. The advantage of hardwired abilities, of course, is they work immediately and don’t have to be learned, as opposed to all of the survival skills that do. David and Ann Premack got the ball (or I should say triangle) rolling on the studies of intuitive social skills by looking for what, if any, social concepts toddlers understood. It had been shown in the early 1940s that, when presented with films of geometric shapes moving in ways that suggest intention or goal-directed behavior (moving in ways that an animal would move), people will even attribute desires and intentions to geometric figures.3 The Premacks demonstrated that even ten- to fourteen-month-old infants, watching objects that appeared to be self-propelled and goal-oriented, automatically interpreted the objects as intentional, and, more important, they assigned a positive or negative value to the interaction between intentional objects.4 This work was extended by J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom, who showed that even six- to ten-month-old infants evaluated others based on their social behavior. These infants watched a video in which an animated triangle with eyes tries to make it up a hill, and it is either helped by a push from a circle or hindered by a push from a square. After the video, the babies were given a choice of the circle or the square on a tray, and they grabbed the “helper” circle.5 The ability to evaluate other people is essential for navigating the social world. It appears that even preverbal infants can figure out who is helpful and who is not, an obvious advantage to a child who needs many years of help to survive.
Looking for early signs of helping behavior in the children themselves, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello believe that even children as young as fourteen months old will altruistically help another. Without encouragement or praise, they will pick up an object that someone has accidentally dropped and hand it back to them,6 sometimes, even if they must stop doing an activity that they are enjoying.7 This, of course, involves not only understanding that others have goals and what they are, but also altruistic behavior to non-kin, an evolutionarily rare behavior that could have foundations in our chimp relatives and already manifests itself in fourteen-month-old children.8 Helping appears to be something that comes naturally and is not something that is exclusively learned. Unlike chimpanzees, however, other research from Tomasello’s lab found that twelve-month-old children will also freely give information. If they know where an object is that someone is looking for, they will point to it.9 Interestingly, altruistic behavior, which is appearing to be innate in humans, is influenced by social experience and cultural transmission.10 Young children by age three begin to inhibit some of their naturally altruistic behavior. They become more discriminating about whom they help. They share more often with others who have shared with them in the past.11 Chimps do the same thing,12 exhibiting at least some of the characteristics of reciprocal altruism. Social norms and rules also begin to influence altruistic behavior in preschool children.13
Origins of Social Behavior: Safety in Numbers
How did such social behavior evolve? When I think about the evolution of human social processes, I divide it into two stages. Evolutionary psychologists continually remind us to remember the environment that our ancestors were living in, which was very sparsely populated. Even as recently as 10,000 B.C., when the glacial ice of the last ice age was retreating in North America, people were few and far between. As the early hominids banded together in small groups for protection from predators and help in hunting, social adaptations were being evolved. For most of human history, food sources were widely scattered, and these small groups were nomadic. It has not been until very recently that the population has become dense, which all started with the development of agriculture and the change to a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, the number of people who were alive in 1950 was about equivalent to the number who had been alive for the entire previous history of the world.
As population density increased, the second stage kicked in: adaptations for navigating and managing the increasingly populated social world. There are now 6.7 billion of us, more than twice the population of 1950. The amazing thing is that we as a species are becoming less violent and get along rather well, contrary to what you may hear on the evening news. The troublemakers, although still very much of a problem, are actually few and far between, perhaps five percent of the population. As a species, we don’t like to kill, cheat, steal, and be abusive. This fact brings us to think about our social interactions and how our mental life is codependent upon others. How do we recognize the emotional states of others in order to understand them, and how do we come by the moral and social rules that we live by? Are the rules learned, innate, or both? What abilities do we have to navigate all the social interactions that we daily face and how did they come about? Are we rational beings living by a set of personal rules, or are there group dynamics that can hijack us? Alone in a situation, does someone act the same as if they were in a group?
It Takes Two to Tango
The realization has come slowly to neuroscience and psychology that we can’t just look at the behavior of one brain. Asif Ghazanfar, who studies vocalization in both macaques and humans at Princeton University, makes the point that not only is there a dynamic relationship going on that involves different parts of the brain, but there is also a dynamic relationship with the other animal that is being listened to. The vocalizations of one monkey modulate the brain processes going on in the other monkey. This is true for humans also. Uri Hasson at Princeton measured the brain activity of a pair of conversing subjects with fMRI. He found that the listener’s brain activity mirrored the speaker’s; some areas of the brain even showed predictive anticipatory responses. When there were such anticipatory responses, there resulted greater understanding.14 The behavior of one person can affect another person’s behavior. The point is that we now understand that we have to look at the whole picture, not just one brain in isolation if we are to understand a more full set of forces in play.
This was a concept that dawned on primatologists many years ago. In 1966, Alison Jolly concluded a paper about Lemur social behavior with, “It thus seems likely that the rudiments of primate society preceded the growth of primate intelligence, made it possible, and determined its nature.”15 The overall line of reasoning goes something like the following, which I have reviewed in my book Human.
Big Brains and Competition, or the Origin of Party Schools
There have been many theories about what forces were relentlessly driving the enlarging of the human brain. Through the processes of natural and sexual selection, it is coming to be accepted that two main factors were at work: A diet with sufficient calories to feed the increasingly metabolically expensive bigger brain, and the challenge of living in a large group (that “social world,” which was necessary to guard against predators and to hunt and gather food). Banding together in social groups resulted in its own set of problems, including competition with others for limited resources, both food and prospective mates. Alison Jolly’s observation, followed by those of others, led Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, to propose what has come to be known as the social brain hypothesis. They proposed that primates have more complex social skills than nonprimates and that living in complexly bonded social groups is more challenging than dealing with the physical world. (Everyone knows it is easier to fix the toaster at the back of the shop than doing customer service up front.) The cognitive challenge of surviving in increasingly larger social groups selected for increases in brain size and function.16
Most monkeys and apes live in long-lasting groups, so that familiar conspecifics are major competitors for access to resources. This situation favors individuals who can offset the costs of competition by using manipulative tactics, and skillful manipulation depends on extensive social knowledge. Because competitive advantage operates relative to the ability of others in the population, an “arms race” of increasing social skills results, which is eventually brought into equilibrium by the high metabolic cost of brain tissue.17
To be successful in a social group involves more than competition. One must also cooperate; otherwise such activities as joint hunting wouldn’t work. To address this issue, developmental and comparative psychologists Henrike Moll and Michael Tomasello have suggested the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis, named after Lev Vygotsky, an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist.* They propose that while cognition in general was driven mainly by social competition, other aspects of cognition that they consider to be unique to humans (the cognitive skills of shared goals, joint attention, joint intentions, and cooperative communication), were driven by or were constituted of, social cooperation, which is needed to create such things as complex technologies, cultural institutions, and systems of symbols, and not by social competition.18
The Bigger the Party, the Bigger the Brain
Oxford University anthropologist Robin Dunbar has provided support for some type of social component driving the evolutionary expansion of the brain. He has found that each primate species tends to have a typical social group size; that brain size correlates with social group size in primates and apes; that the bigger the neocortex, the larger the social group; and that the great apes require a bigger neocortex per given group size than do the other primates.19 While a typical social group size for a chimpanzee is about 55 individuals, Dunbar predicted from the size of human brains that the typical social group size for humans is about 150 individuals.20 Then he studied actual human social groups, and it turns out that this social group size has been constant for humans from prehistoric times through today. Not only was this the size of related groups that gathered together once a year for traditional ceremonies in ancestral hunter-gatherers, it is also the size of modern-day hunter-gatherer societies and modern-day Christmas card lists in personal address books.21 Today’s social networking sites appear to be no different. In an ongoing study, Dunbar has so far found that even people with hundreds of “friends” interact with a limited number of them. “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.”22
Research has shown that 150–200 people are the number of people that can be controlled without an organizational hierarchy.23 It is the number of people one can keep track of, maintain a stable social relationship with, and would be willing to help with a favor. Yet, why is our social group size limited? To have social relationships, you call on five cognitive abilities: (1) you must interpret visual information to recognize others, then (2) be able to remember both faces and (3) who has a relationship with whom; (4) you must process emotional information, and then (5) manipulate information about a set of relationships. Dunbar has found that it is the ability to manipulate information about a set of relationships that is the limiting factor. The other processes are not running at capacity. Information about social relationships requires additional processing capacity, as well as specific specializations, while the others do not.
Wanderlust Lost
Since a myriad of forces drives evolution, one has to be careful not to focus too much on just one aspect. Years ago I was privileged to be part of a small study group that Leon Festinger had put together that also included David Premack and social psychologist Stanley Schachter. Leon was interested in what could account for the vast differences between our species and other animals. He pointed out that one of the possible consequences of social behavior, which triggered so many changes, was becoming sedentary and abandoning the nomadic lifestyle. Between 10,500 and 8,500 B.C., many things that had been accumulating over the past thousands of years came together and made a major change in lifestyle possible. There was the end of the last glacial period; there was control of fire and more effective hunting; the dog had been domesticated (the social world really took off, now that man had a best friend!); there was an increased consumption of fish and a greater reliance on storable cereal grains. Festinger concluded that sedentary existence was the fundamental change that irreversibly altered the course of human evolution. A sedentary lifestyle allowed humans to reproduce more successfully (owing to a reduction of miscarriages and a reduction of spacing between children), and group size quickly increased to around 150. Although the environment and natural resources normally temper the population increases caused by the endogenous drive to reproduce, this was not so for humans. They were able, sooner or later, to find or invent solutions to problems and markedly change their environment while they were evolving. So as sedentary groups formed, their populations increased; around 7,000 B.C. someone had a big idea, and agriculture came on the scene. This was followed by increasing specialization from 6,000 to 4,500 B.C., which required more interdependence in communities, which in turn created a greater potential for status and power differences. Meanwhile, there was the development of natural and religious technologies, social rules, gossip, and moral stance to control and organize these communities of people.
You Can’t Keep ’Em Down on the Farm . . .
The point is that along with all our automatic processes, there is this whole living environment changing and impacting our behavior, thinking, and perhaps even our genome. Primitive social behavior was largely intact before the sedentary life style developed. It was sedentary life and the subsequent civilizations, however, which provided the milieu in which complex social behaviors arose and the social brain flourished. We entered into what I call stage 2, a coevolution with emerging civilization that continues to shape social components of the human brain, even today.
Coevolution?
How could such coevolution come about? In essence, natural selection is a case of downward causation with a sort of feedback mechanism to a passive selector. The environment is downwardly causal in that whatever survives, survives the effects of the environment for whatever reason. The survivor is the feedback, in that he reproduces and allows the next generation in its turn to be acted upon by the environment. Now if the survivor slightly changes the environment, then what the slightly changed environment selects may be slightly changed. It may be no different with social processes: The social environment is just another factor contributing to the overall environment that is selecting in a downwardly causal way, with a feedback mechanism at work.
As I mentioned before, a genetically fixed trait is always superior to one that must be learned because learning may or may not happen. Time, energy, and opportunity to learn are required and may not be available. For both an infant and an adult, hard wired automatic responses offer a survival advantage, but as one progresses through life, flexibility in the face of change is also advantageous. The physical environment is not stable. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, ice ages, droughts, famines, and so on, do happen. Change and the unexpected do arise. As philosopher David Papineau points out, “As a general rule, then, we can expect that genetic fixity will be favoured when there is long-term environmental stability, and that learning will be selected for when there are variable environments. Given environmental stability, genetic fixity will have the . . . advantages of reliable and cheap acquisition. But these advantages can easily be outweighed by loss of flexibility when there is significant environmental instability.”24 The social environment can also be unstable, as evidenced by marked changes in population and its geographical distribution.
In 1896, the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin, working within the framework of Darwinian selection, sought a way to explain the evolution of traits that were not fixed but learned during an organism’s life. At first glance this sounds like Lamarckian genetics, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but it is not. He came up with the idea that while acquired traits cannot be inherited, the tendency to acquire certain traits can be.25 (Using my old example, one has the tendency to acquire the fear of snakes but does not have the tendency to acquire the fear of flowers.) The first mention of the Baldwin effect at the Gifford lectures was by Conrad Waddington in 1971. In essence, the Baldwin effect is a mechanism that explains the evolution of phenotypic (observable trait) plasticity, the ability which allows an organism to be flexible in adapting its behavior to changing environments. As evolutionary neurobiologists Leah Krubitzer and Jon Kaas put it,
Although the phenotype generated is context-dependent, the ability to respond to the context has a genetic basis. . . . In essence, the Baldwin effect is the evolution of the ability to respond optimally to a particular environment. Thus, genes for plasticity evolve, rather than genes for a particular phenotypic characteristic, although selection acts upon the phenotype.26
Becoming Flexible Isn’t from Doing Yoga
There are two types of biological mechanisms that can result in the Baldwin effect: genetic assimilation and niche construction. Krubitzer and Kaas explain genetic assimilation:
A particular phenotypic characteristic that is optimal for a given environment can become incorporated into the genome over successive generations by endowing a selective advantage to those individuals who display these optimal characteristics, and who have a strong correlation between genotypic and phenotypic space. This characteristic is then displayed even in the absence of the environmental condition that first produced it. This process, known as genetic assimilation [italics added], accounts for how activity-dependent modifications to the phenotype come under genetic control and become part of the evolutionary process.
The other biological mechanism is niche construction. Hidden in plain view, niche construction27 has been a neglected topic in evolutionary theory until recently. F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman are trying to change this:
Organisms, through their metabolisms, activities and choices, define and partly create their own niches. They may also partly destroy them. This process of organism-driven environmental modification is called “niche construction.” Niche construction regularly modifies both biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection and, in doing so, generates forms of feedback that change the dynamics of the evolutionary process.28
Obvious examples of niche construction are coral and the reefs that they build; beavers and their dams; and yours truly, Homo sapiens, and Paris.
Both of these biological mechanisms seem to involve a type of feedback that can alter the evolutionary process. The big idea behind the Baldwin effect is that sometimes both the direction and the rate of evolutionary change by natural selection can be affected by learned behaviors.
When one considers what has been happening in the last twelve thousand years, what we see is not a stable environment but a changing one, one where flexibility would be survival-enhancing. Not only was the landscape changing as the glaciers were retreating, but lifestyle, population density, and social organization were also changing. The question that presents itself is whether the increasing social interactions could in some way have affected our evolution. David Papineau makes an interesting point:
[I]t has always seemed to me obvious that there is at least one kind of case where it [Baldwin effect] operates—namely, with the social learning of complex behavioural traits. . . . Suppose some complex behavioural trait P is socially learnt—individuals learn P from others, where they have no real chance of figuring it out for themselves. This will then create selection pressures for genes that make individuals better at socially acquiring P. But these genes wouldn’t have any selective advantage without the prior culture of P, since that culture is in practice necessary for any individual to learn P. After all, there will not be any advantage to a gene that makes you better at learning P from others, if there aren’t any others to learn P from. So this then looks like a Baldwin effect: genes for P are selected precisely because P was previously acquired via social learning. . . . Social learning has a special connection with the Baldwin effect because it is prone to trigger both of these mechanisms [genetic assimilation and niche construction]. When we have social learning, then we are likely to find cases where niche construction and genetic assimilation push in the same direction, and thus create powerful biological pressures.
The idea is that once individuals banded into groups, they were caught in a social world. Those who responded better to the social rules and practices that emerged were the ones who were more successful, survived, and reproduced. They were selected for, in a downwardly causal way, by the environment, part of which was social.
Even Monkeys Have Fuzz
Complex social systems exist in other species, and clues to how ours arose are being teased from observations of these other animals. For instance, Jessica Flack has found evidence for the existence of monkey cops!29 These policing individuals are important to the cohesiveness of the social group as a whole. They not only terminate conflicts or reduce their intensity, but their presence also prevents conflicts from occurring and spreading, and it facilitates active sociopositive interactions among group members. When the policing macaques are temporarily removed, conflict increases. Just as with human societies, when the policeman is present, there are fewer barroom brawls, and speeders slow down on the freeways. Her results suggest that having a policeman around “influences large-scale social organization and facilitates levels of social cohesion and integration that might otherwise be impossible.”30 A macaque social network is more than just the sum of its parts. A group of macaques can foster either a harmonious, productive society or a divided, insecure grouping of cliques, depending on the organization of its individuals.
What is just as interesting, especially to our quest, is the conclusion she draws,
This means that power structure, by making effective conflict management possible, influences social network structure and therefore feeds back down to the individual level to constrain individual behaviour [italics added]. Pigtailed macaque social organization is not an epiphenomenon but a causal structure that both shapes, and is shaped by, individual interactions.
The social group constrains individual behavior, and individual behavior shapes the type of social group that evolves. This plays back to our idea of individual behavior’s not being solely the product of an isolated, deterministic brain but being affected by the social group.
Domesticating the Wild Man
Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello have proposed that the constraining of individual behavior has eventually led to genetic changes, as suggested by their emotional reactivity hypothesis. Chimpanzees are not generally a cooperative animal. They only cooperate in certain competitive situations—and only with certain individuals. This stands in marked contrast with humans, who are largely cooperative. Otherwise, how would the pyramids or the Roman aqueducts ever have been built? Hare and Tomasello think that the social behavior of chimps is constrained by their temperament, and the human temperament is necessary for more complex forms of social cognition. In order to develop the level of cooperation that is necessary for humans to live in large social groups, humans had to become less aggressive and less competitive. Hare and Tomasello think that humans may have undergone a self-domestication process in which overly aggressive or despotic others were either ostracized or killed by the group. Thus, the gene pool was modified, which resulted in the selection of systems that controlled (that is, inhibited) emotional reactivity such as aggression. (We will see later that an area of the right prefrontal cortex has actually been found that inhibits self-interested behavior!) The social group constrained the behavior and eventually affected the genome.
Hare’s and Tomasello’s emotional reactivity hypothesis grew out of work done by Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, who began domesticating foxes in Siberia in 1959 and whose domestication program continues today. He used only one criterion for his breeding selection process: He picked the young foxes that approached his outstretched hand the closest. Thus, he was selecting for fearless and nonaggressive behavior toward humans. After only a few years, the by-products of this selection process were similar to what is seen in domestic dogs. The foxes had floppy ears, upturned tails, piebald colorations like border collies, a prolonged reproductive season, and bigger litters; the females had higher serotonin levels (known to decrease some types of aggressive behavior); and the levels of many of the chemicals in the brain that regulate stress and aggressive behavior had been altered.31 These domesticated foxes responded with equal skill to the human communicative gestures of pointing and gazing as do domestic dogs.32 All these characteristics were linked to the gene associated with fear inhibition. It seems that sociocognitive evolution has occurred in the experimental foxes as a correlated by-product of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression. Dog domestication is thought to have occurred by a similar process. Wild dogs that were less fearful of humans were the ones that approached their camps, scavenged food, stuck around, and reproduced. Perhaps both man’s best human and canine friends were selected for in the same manner.
Social to the Core
The great social psychologist Floyd Henry Allport said “Socialized behavior is . . . the supreme achievement of the cortex.”33 He was right. If you think about this for a moment, you will realize that the social world is our main focus, and it takes up an extraordinary amount of our time and energy. When was the last time that you were not thinking of something social? It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that most of your thinking is social: Why are they doing that? What was she thinking? Not another meeting! When did they get married? Does he like me? I owe them a dinner. And on and on. It can drive you crazy! All these social thoughts are reflected in our conversations. Consider all those cell phone conversations that you overhear. Ever hear anyone talking about particle physics or prehistoric stone axes? Social psychologist Nicholas Emler has studied the content of conversations and found that 80 to 90 percent are about specific names and known individuals, that is, social small talk.34 We are social animals to the core.
Theory of Mind or I Know That You Know That I Believe That . . .
We neuroscientists are finally directing some of our efforts to the social world and the new field of social neuroscience has come on the scene. Complex social interactions depend on our ability to understand the mental states of others, and in 1978 David Premack came up with a fundamental idea that now governs so much of social psychological neuroscience work. He realized that humans have the innate ability to understand that others have minds with different desires, intentions, beliefs, and mental states, and the ability to form theories, with some degree of accuracy, about what those desires, intentions, beliefs, and mental states are. He called this ability theory of mind (TOM) and wondered to what extent other animals possessed it. Just the fact that he wondered if other animals possessed it sets him apart from most of us. Most people assume that other animals, especially cute ones with big eyes, have a theory of mind, and many of us even project this onto objects. In fact, within seconds, this response can be elicited in the presence of Leonardo, a socially programmed robot at MIT, who looks like a puckish cross between a Yorkshire terrier and a squirrel that is two and a half feet tall. While observing the behavior of what appears to be a self-propelled and goal-oriented robot, just as babies watching the triangle trying to get up the hill, we automatically see the robot as having intentions and we come up with psychological theories, that is, interpretations, about why Leo is behaving in a certain way, just as we do with other people (and our pets).
Once you understand the power of this mechanism, what activates it, and how we humans apply it to everything from our pets to our cars, it is easy to understand why anthropomorphism is so easy to resort to, and why it can be so hard for humans to accept that some of their psychological processes are unique. We are wired to think otherwise. After thirty years of clever research looking for TOM in other animals, evidence for it is lacking. It appears to be present to a limited degree in chimpanzees,35 but that is it so far. So even though you have a theory about your dog, what he is thinking about, what he believes, and so forth, he does not have a theory about you, and he gets along quite well by tracking observables—your movements, facial expressions, habits of behavior, and tone of voice, and making predictions from them. TOM is fully developed automatically in children by about age four to five, and there are signs that it is partially,36 or even fully, present by eighteen months.37 Interestingly, children and adults with autism have deficits in theory of mind and are impaired in their ability to reason about the mental states of others,38 and, as a result, their social skills are compromised.
Mirror Neurons and Understanding Mental States
In the mid-1990s, while they were studying the grasping neurons in macaque monkeys, Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues discovered something quite remarkable and soon realized that they had come across the cortical origins of how an animal could appreciate the mental state of another. They found that when a monkey grasps a grape, the very same neuron fires as when the monkey observes another individual grasping a grape.39 They called these mirror neurons, and they are one of the great recent discoveries in neuroscience. They were the first concrete evidence that there is a neural link between observation and imitation of an action, a cortical substrate for understanding and appreciating the actions of others. Since these original observations, mirror neuron systems that are quite different and much more extensive than those of the macaque have been identified in humans. The mirror neurons in the monkey are restricted to hand and mouth movements and only fire when there is goal-directed action, which may be why monkeys have very limited imitation abilities. In humans, however, there are mirror neurons that correspond to movements all over the body, and they fire even when there is no goal;40 in fact, the same neurons are active even when we only imagine an action. The mirror neurons are implicated not only in the imitating of actions, but also in understanding the intention of actions.
Understanding Other’s Emotions
The ramifications of the human mirroring systems are gradually being understood and have huge implications. They are thought to be the neural basis of not only action understanding, but emotional understanding as well. In the insulae, humans have mirror systems, which are involved with understanding and experiencing the emotions of others, mediated through the visceromotor response.** Such systems, by unconsciously, internally replicating actions and emotions, may be the mechanism that gives us an implicit grasp of how and what other people feel or do, and contribute input used by the interpreter for theorizing about the cause (the why) for the actions and emotions of others. This is known as simulation theory: You perceive through your senses an emotional stimulus (for example, you see the look of fear on someone’s face), your body automatically responds to it by simulating it (you automatically imitate the look of fear, which results in your visceromotor system giving you a shot of adrenaline, thus simulating the emotion), which can either make it to your attention and be recognized or not. If it does come to your attention, then your interpreter comes up with a cause for the emotional feeling. You see your friend answer her phone and a look of happiness comes on her face. You smile too as you mirror her expression and you too get the same visceromotor response. You don’t need to hear the other side of the conversation to know what your friend is feeling. You already know. You come up with the conclusion that she just got offered the job she was hoping for. We come to understand the states of others by simulating them in our brain and body.
These types of mirrored reactions have been demonstrated by fMRI scanning. For instance, there are anatomical connections in the brain between regions that make up the pain system that are highly interactive. There appears to be a separation, however, between the sensory (the ouch) and emotional (the anxiety of the “oh no, it’s going to hurt”) perceptions of pain. fMRI scans have shown that both the observer and the recipient of pain have activity in the part of the brain that is active with the emotional perception of pain, but only the recipient has activity in the area that is active with the sensory experience.41 When you see another person in pain, you feel the anxiety, but not the pain itself. In another imaging experiment, subjects were first scanned while experiencing pain (either hot or cold stimuli) of different magnitudes to see what brain areas would be involved. The activity of one of the pain regions modulated according to subjects’ reactivity to their pain: more pain, more activity. Then they were simply shown photographs of people experiencing pain (like a stubbed toe), and they rated the intensity of the pain they thought was being suffered. The same areas were active to the same degree both when they felt pain and when they looked at a painful image that they had rated of equal magnitude.42 Taken together, these experiments are supportive of the idea that in order to understand the mental states of others, we literally simulate their mental state.
Nonconscious Imitation or Mimicry
Our faces are our most prominent social feature. They reflect our emotional states, but as we have just learned, they also react to the emotional states of others. A 30-millisecond (ms) exposure to happy, neutral, and angry faces (too fast to consciously register that a face was even seen) will cause you to have measurable facial muscle reactions that correspond to the happy and angry faces43 (these studies were done in nonsocial situations, which, we later see, matters). What we are talking about is nonconscious imitation, or mimicry. We actually mimic others constantly, but it happens so fast, we cannot actually perceive it.44 We mimic the facial expressions, postures, vocal intonations, accents,45 even speech patterns and words of others unconsciously.46 Not only do we unconsciously copy the mannerisms of others, but we like and have smoother interactions with strangers if the stranger copies our mannerisms. Unconsciously, a connection is formed, and you “like” people who are similar to you. If we have been mimicked, we are also more helpful toward other people who are present than are nonmimicked individuals.47 We also tend to agree with others we like.48 Mimicry is what makes babies copy their mothers’ expressions, sticking out their tongues when they do and smiling when they do. The consequences of this tendency to automatically mimic facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person are to converge emotionally with them, known as emotional contagion.49 When one crying newborn in the nursery sets the others off, they are already showing evidence of emotional contagion.
Obviously all this mimicking behavior greases the machinery of social interactions and increases positive social behavior. This binding of people together through enhancing prosocial behavior may have adaptive value by acting as social glue that holds the group together, fostering safety in numbers.
When competition or members of a different group enter the picture, however, things change. people do not mimic the faces of those with whom they are in competition50 nor with politicians with whom they do not agree.51 More recently it has been shown that the relationship between the observer and the observed is relevant for mimicry reactions and not all emotional expressions are equally mimicked.52 Happiness is always mimicked, negative expressions are not, depending on who is being mimicked. While mimicry increases rapport, it is not always beneficial to an individual to do so, especially with a competitor for limited resources. So while happiness, a low-cost emotion, is always mimicked, for it does not cost the observer, negative emotional expressions are mimicked only when shown by an ingroup member, because mimicking sadness (offering help) or anger (either signaling threat or expressing affiliation) can be costly. In fact, men only report sadness with a double affiliation: a close, ingroup member.53 It is looking like mimicry is not purely automatic and reflexive; occasionally brakes are applied based on social context. It is an affiliative signal that is a major player in maintaining and regulating social interactions, especially within a social ingroup.
Voluntary imitation, however, is another cup of tea. It is difficult to consciously mimic someone because conscious behavior is slow. If you consciously try to mimic someone, it looks phony and throws the communication out of sync. Nevertheless, it is a tremendous way that things get transmitted among our species and is a potent mechanism in learning and acculturation.54 Humans are the biggest voluntary imitators in the animal kingdom. We are, in fact, overimitators. While chimpanzees also voluntarily imitate others, they go straight for the goal or reward, while children will copy unnecessary actions to get a reward. Chimpanzees may imitate you as you cross over a plank for a banana, but they won’t imitate your tiptoeing across as a child would do. Children are imitating machines, which is why parents have to be so careful about what they do and say, otherwise that cute lil’ pumpkin is going to be swearing like a sailor. The ubiquitousness of imitation in the human world stands in stark contrast with its rarity in the animal kingdom. It appears to exist to some degree in the great apes, some birds, and perhaps in dolphins.55 Even in all the thousands of monkeys that have been studied, voluntary imitation56 has only been elicited in two Japanese monkeys after many years of intense training.57
Innately Moral
We mirror, we imitate, we simulate emotions. We communicate in so many ways to navigate the social complexities of our human world. Even so, how is it that most of us get along—that 6.7 billion people aren’t at one another’s throats all the time? Are we really relying on learned behavior and conscious reasoning, or do we have a hardwired sense of appropriate behavior? Could we have an innate moral sense as a species that evolved as we banded together for survival? Is it not a good idea to kill because we are wired to think so, or because God or Allah or Buddha or our government said not to? These questions about whether we have an innate sense of moral behavior are not new. David Hume asked the same thing in 1777, “There has been a controversy started of late . . . concerning the general foundation of morals; whether they be derived from reason, or from sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense.”58 While philosophers and religious leaders have been battling over this question for centuries, neuroscience now has tools and empirical evidence to help us answer it.
Anthropologist Donald Brown59 collected a list of human universals that included many concepts that cultures share having to do with what is considered moral behavior. Some of these are: fairness; empathy; the difference between right and wrong and redressing wrongs; praise and admiration for generous behavior; prohibitions against murder, incest, rape, and violent behavior; rights and obligations; and shame. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in an effort to include what is common to all moral systems, not just Western thought, has come up with this definition: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.”60
Moral Intuitions
Many moral intuitions are rapid automatic judgments of behavior associated with strong feelings of rightness or appropriateness. They are not usually arrived at by a deliberate conscious evaluative process that has been influenced by reason in the fullness of time. If you were to witness a person intentionally violate one of the above universal moral behaviors, most likely you would have a moral intuition about that behavior. A blatant example of such an intuition would occur if you were to see a child, who was quietly playing in a sandbox, get slapped in the face by his grandmother. You would have an immediate judgment about that behavior: It was bad, wrong, inappropriate, and you would be righteously indignant. When asked about your judgment it would be easily explicable. Such an example, however, doesn’t really help us much when we consider Hume’s question. Haidt came up with a different scenario and set about presenting it to all sorts of people:
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other.61
Was it okay for them to make love? Haidt did a good job designing this story to stir up all of one’s gut instincts and moral intuitions. He defines moral intuitions as “the sudden appearance in consciousness, or at the fringe of consciousness, of an evaluative feeling (like-dislike, good-bad) about the character or actions of a person, without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion.”62 In his scenario, however, he also provides a rational answer to every objection. Haidt knew that most people would say that it was wrong and disgusting, and they do, but he wanted to get to the root reasoning, if any, we all must use. Why is it wrong? What does your rational brain say? Not unexpectedly, many answered that inbreeding could cause a deformed infant or that they could be hurt emotionally. Both of these objections, however, had been addressed in the original scenario. Haidt found that most respondents will eventually say, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” Is this a rational judgment or an intuitive one? Either we learned the moral rule that incest is wrong from our parents, religion, or culture or it is an innate, hardwired rule we have a difficult time over-ruling with rational arguments.
All cultures have incest taboos. It is universally accepted as bad human behavior. Because humans cannot automatically recognize their siblings by visual cues (hence all those movies where a sister and brother are raised separately, meet accidentally, and fall in love), Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, in 1891, suggested that humans have evolved an innate mechanism, which usually works, that discourages incest. This mechanism causes a person to be uninterested or averse to having sex with people that one has spent a lot of time with as a child.63 This rule predicts childhood friends and stepsiblings who were brought up together, along with full siblings, would all be found not to marry, and this has held true in studies looking at this question.64
Evolutionary psychologist Debra Lieberman expanded upon these findings.65 She was interested how personal incest taboos—“Sex with my sibling is wrong”—generalize to a greater opposition, “incest is wrong for everyone,” and whether this comes spontaneously from within or is learned. She found that an individual’s moral attitude against incest in general was increased by the amount of time that the individual had actually spent living under the same roof with their sibling (related, adopted, or step-), and it was not increased by learned social or parental instruction, nor was it increased by the degree of relatedness to the sibling.
Shunning incest is not a rationally learned behavior and attitude that was taught to us by our parents or friends or religious teacher. If it were rational, then it would not apply to adopted or stepsiblings. It is a trait that has been selected by evolution because it worked in most situations to avoid producing offspring who were less healthy due to inbreeding and the expression of recessive genes. It is innate, and that is why it is universal in all cultures.
Your conscious rational brain, however, does not know that you have an innate incest avoidance system. All it knows is that siblings are having sex and that is BAD. It is when you are asked “why is it bad?” that your interpreter, working only with the information it has, which usually doesn’t include the latest literature on incest avoidance but does include that bad feeling, tries to explain, and a variety of reasons will come pouring out of your brain!
That Ol’ Trolley Problem
Another approach to the question of whether there is universal moral reasoning took Marc Hauser and his colleagues to the Internet with the classic trolley problem, devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson. He predicted that if moral judgments are the result of a rational process, then people of different ages and cultures would have different answers for abstract moral problems. What is your answer?
A runaway trolley is headed for five people, who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save them is for Denise, a passenger on the train, to pull a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks, where it will kill one person instead of five. Should Denise pull the switch and turn the trolley in order to save five people at the expense of one?
Of the more than 200,000 people across the world who replied, 89 percent agreed that it is okay for Denise to pull the switch. But when asked this question:
As before, a trolley threatens to kill five people. Frank is standing next to a large stranger on a footbridge crossing above the tracks, between the oncoming trolley and five workmen on the tracks below. If he pushes the large stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below it will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if he does this, but the five workmen will not be killed. Is it okay for Frank to save the five others by pushing this stranger to his death?
Eighty-nine percent of people will answer NO to this one. This is a striking agreement across age and cultural groups, as is the dichotomy in response, when the actual numbers (save five by allowing one death) are no different in the two dilemmas. When people are asked about their response, whatever it is, they offer a wide variety of explanations, none particularly logical. Knowing what we have learned about our interpreter module, we would expect that there would be all sorts of explanations. The neuroscientist doesn’t really care what they all are but wonders if there are moral reasoning centers or systems in the brain, what kinds of dilemmas activate them and what areas of the brain are active when moral decisions are being made.
Joshua Greene and his colleagues wondered if the same part of the brain was being used in both scenarios, so they scanned subjects in a brain imaging experiment while they were deciding their responses. With the first dilemma, which was an impersonal one (flip a switch), areas associated with abstract reasoning and problem solving had increased activity, and in the second scenario, which was a personal dilemma (the stranger had to be physically touched and pushed), the brain areas associated with emotion and social cognition had increased activity.66 There are two different interpretations of these results. I have given a hint as to what Greene thinks is the difference: impersonal versus personal. Marc Hauser wasn’t convinced, pointing out that there are too many variables in these dilemmas to narrow it down to personal versus impersonal. The responses could also be explained from the standpoint that the means don’t justify the ends: the philosophical principle that it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving greater good but not to use harm to achieve it.67 This is then discussing action based on intent. With either interpretation, the notion is that in certain situations there are moral brakes that are universal, and they come on and stop us from certain activities.
Moral Judgment and Emotions
Antonio Damasio and his group were able to help answer the question of whether emotional responses played a causal role in moral judgments.68 They had a group of patients who had lesions in a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). These patients had defects both in emotional response and emotion regulation, but normal general intelligence, logical reasoning, and declarative knowledge of social and moral norms. The Damasio team hypothesized that, if emotional responses (mediated by VMPC) influence moral judgment, then these patients would make utilitarian judgments on the personal moral scenarios (the second trolley problem), but would have a normal pattern of judgment on the impersonal moral scenarios. While being scanned, the patients answered questions about situations with competing low-conflict-solution choices, such as, “Is it okay to murder your boss?” Both normal controls and people with the lesions answered, “No, that’s crazy, it is not okay.” Things changed, however, when the question was about high-conflict, personal moral dilemmas (which had competing considerations of aggregate welfare versus harm to others) that normally evoke a strong social emotion. Along with the second trolley problem, another such question would be: “During a brutal war, you are hiding from enemy soldiers in a room with ten other people including a baby. The baby starts to cry, which will reveal your hiding place. Is it okay to smother the baby so that the nine other people won’t be discovered and killed by the soldiers?” With this type of question, the VMPC patients’ judgment and reaction times significantly differed from the controls. Without the emotional reaction to the scenarios, they were faster and more utilitarian in their responses: Sure, push the fat man, and sure, smother the baby.
Moral Emotions, Moral Rationalizations, and the Interpreter
Jonathan Haidt proposes that people begin with their reaction to the dilemma, a result of an unconscious moral emotion, and then work backward to justify it. Here the interpreter steps in and comes up with a moral rationalization using information from the individual’s culture, family, learning, and so forth. Although it is possible, we don’t generally engage in moral reasoning. This only tends to happen when we change our perspective, put ourselves in the shoes of another person, see where they’re comin’ from. Marc Hauser suggests that we are born with abstract moral rules and a preparedness to acquire others, just as we are born with a preparedness to acquire language, and then the environment, our family, and culture constrain and guide us to a particular moral system, as they do to a particular language.
Yet consider Steven Pinker’s trolley scenario:
A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of six-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?
This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.69
While Pinker’s objection presents a problem, it is not impossible to square this up with our theory of a universal innate moral behavior; we just have to consider the influence of culture, and Jonathan Haidt and his colleague will help.
Universal Moral Modules
Haidt and Craig Joseph have come up with a list of universal moral modules after comparing works about human universals, cultural differences in morality, and precursors of morality in chimpanzees. Their five modules have to do with suffering (it’s good to help and not harm others), reciprocity (from this comes a sense of fairness), hierarchy (respect for elders and those in legitimate authority), coalitionary bonding (loyalty to your group) and purity (praising cleanliness and shunning contamination and carnal behavior).70 Intuitive moral judgments arise from these modules, which evolved to deal with the specific circumstances common to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who lived in a social world made up of groups of mostly related people, banded together for survival. Occasionally they came across other bands, some hostile, some not, some more closely related than others, all dealing with the same survival problems: limited resources, eating and not being eaten, finding shelter, reproducing, and taking care of offspring. They often faced dilemmas in their interactions, and some of these circumstances involved what we now consider to be moral or ethical issues. Individual survival was dependent on both the survival of the group that offered the protection of numbers, and his personal skills within the social group and with the physical world. Individuals and groups that survived and reproduced were those who navigated such moral issues successfully. Darwin recognized this when he wrote,
A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism [coalitions], fidelity [coalitions], obedience [respect for authority], courage, and sympathy [suffering], were always ready to aid one another [reciprocity], and to sacrifice themselves for the common good [coalitions], would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.71
Virtues Are Not Universal
Haidt’s and Joseph’s list of moral modules, and hence what they consider to be the moral foundations of different societies, is broader than that of other Western psychologists. They attribute this to the influence of not only Western culture, but the culture of politically liberal universities from whence these researchers arise. They suggest that the first two modules, which are focused on an individual, are what Western culture and liberal ideology are founded on, while the other three modules, which are focused on the survival of the group, are also incorporated in the morality of conservatives and other world cultures.
While the moral modules are universal, virtues, which are based on a hodgepodge from these modules, are not. Virtues are what a specific society or culture values as morally good behavior that can be learned. Different cultures place different values on various aspects of Haidt’s five modules. The family, the social milieu, and the culture that we find ourselves in influence individual thought and behavior. Thus, what one culture, one political party, indeed even what one family considers to be virtuous (morally praiseworthy) is not universal. This is what drives cultural differences in morality and can explain Pinker’s trolley problem. Haidt speculates that the differences between American political parties are driven by differences in value that they place on the five moral modules.
Belief Attribution in the Right Brain?
Neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe thought there was more than just the simulating of emotions going on when we tried to understand the beliefs and moral stance of others, or when we try to predict and manipulate their beliefs. To see if she was correct, she and her colleagues employed the classic false belief task while brain scanning her subjects. In the false belief task, Sally and Anne are in a room and Sally hides a ball in a blue box while Anne watches, and then Sally leaves the room. Anne then gets up and moves the ball into a red box. Then Sally comes back into the room. After watching this scenario and then being asked where Sally thinks the ball is, the children who are younger than four say Sally thinks the ball is in the red box. They do not understand that Sally has a false belief. After age four to five, they do understand and say that she thinks the ball in the blue box. This is a mechanism that develops and predictably comes on line at age four to five that allows understanding that others can have a false belief. Saxe has found that a specific right-hemisphere brain area is activated when adult subjects think about the beliefs of others, when they are explicitly told someone’s belief in writing, when they follow loose directions to consider another’s belief, and when they are instructed to predict actions of someone holding a false belief.
When I first heard of these findings, I was shocked that this mechanism was located in the right hemisphere. Because if this information about the beliefs of others is housed in the right hemisphere, and if, in split-brain patients, the information about others can’t get to the left hemisphere, which does problem solving and has language capacity, then they should have a disruption in moral reasoning. But this doesn’t happen. Split-brain patients act like everyone else. Once again my colleagues and I tested our endlessly patient patients. We took this idea that belief attribution of others is located in the right hemisphere, already knowing that goal representation of others is located in the left hemisphere, and we asked the following kinds of questions to our split-brain patients:
1. If Susie the secretary believes that she is adding sugar to her boss’s coffee, but it actually was poison accidentally left there by a chemist, her boss drinks it and dies, was that a permissible action?
2. If Susie the secretary wants to bump her boss off and intends to add poison to his coffee, but it actually is sugar, he drinks it, and he is fine, was that permissible?
Is a listener to these stories going to be concerned about only the outcome, or will they judge on the basis of the beliefs of the actor? If you or I were asked these questions, we would say that the first action was permissible because she thought that the coffee was okay. The action in the second question, however, was not permissible, because the secretary thought it was poisoned coffee. We judge based on the secretary’s intent, the beliefs of the actor. How were our split-brain patients going to respond? Separating the brain areas involved with the belief of others from the areas responsible for problem solving, language, and speech would predict that the split-brain patient would care only about outcomes, and this is what happened. They judged completely based on outcomes.
For example, after hearing a scenario in which a waitress knowingly serves sesame seeds to somebody she believes is highly allergic to them, yet the outcome was positive because the person turned out not to be allergic, J.W. quickly judged the action to be permissible. Because the split-brain patients function normally in the real world, what happened next wasn’t surprising. Moments later, after his conscious brain processed what he had just said, J.W. rationalized (the interpreter to the rescue) his response: “Sesame seeds are just little, tiny things, they are not going to hurt you.” He had to square his automatic response, which did not benefit from information about the belief state of the waitress, with what he rationally and consciously knows is permissible in the world.
Inhibiting Self-Interest
We often consider dilemmas that have to do with fairness to be moral dilemmas. A fascinating, well-known finding involves what is known as the ultimatum game. Two people are involved in this game and they are only allowed one round. One person is given twenty dollars, and he has to split it with the other player, but he determines the percent split. Both players get to keep whatever amount of money is first offered. However, if the player who is offered the money refuses the offer, then neither gets any. In a rational world, the player who gets offered the money should take any offer because that is the only way he will come out ahead. That, however, is not how people react. They will accept the money only if they think it is a fair offer, ranging from at least six to eight dollars. Ernst Fehr72 and his colleagues used transcranial electric stimulation to disrupt brain functioning in the prefrontal cortex and found that when the function of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was disrupted, people would accept lower offers while still judging them to be unfair. Since suppression of this area increased selfish responses to unfair offers, it suggests that this area normally inhibits self-interest (taking any offer) and reduces the impact of the selfish urges on the decision-making processes, and thus plays a key role in implementing behaviors that are fair.
More evidence for this region’s inhibiting selfish responses is from Damasio’s group, which has given moral tests to adults who have had injuries to this area since childhood. Their answers were excessively egocentric, as was their behavior. They exhibited a lack of self-centered inhibition and did not take another’s perspective. people who acquire these types of lesions as adults, such as the patients Damasio tested with the moral dilemma problems, can compensate better, which suggests the neural systems that had been impaired at an early age were critical for the acquisition of social knowledge.73
Many examples of moral circuits have been identified, and they seem to be distributed all over the brain. We have many innate responses to our social world, including automatic empathy, implicit evaluation of others, and emotional reactions, and these all inform our moral judgments. Yet we typically do not think about these automatic responses nor appeal to them when explaining our decisions. Humans act commonly on moral challenges but claim different reasons for doing so. This is because there is a cacophony of influences that guide our behavior and judgments. The influences involve emotional systems and special moral judgment systems; the innate moral behavior pours out, and then we give it an interpretation. We personally believe the interpretation and it becomes a meaningful part of our life. But what sets off our responses are these universal properties that we all have.
It appears we all share the same moral networks and systems, and tend to respond in similar ways to similar issues. The way we differ is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do and the weight that we give these different moral systems. Understanding that our theories and the value that we place on them are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way, it seems to me, in helping people with different beliefs systems to get along.
Our brain has evolved neural circuitry that enables us to thrive in a social context. Even as infants we make judgments and choices and behave based on the action of others. We prefer others who are helpful, or even neutral, to others who hinder. We understand when another needs help, and we engage in altruistic helping. Our extensive mirror neuron systems give us the ability to understand the intentions and emotions of others, and from this information our interpreter module weaves together a theory about others. We also use the same module to weave a story about ourselves.
As our social context changes through the accumulation of knowledge about our very nature, we may want to change how we live and experience our social life—especially with respect to justice and punishment. This leads us to the story in the next chapter about how we incorporate social dynamics into personal choice, how we figure out the intentions, emotions, and goals of others in order to survive, and understand how social process constrains individual minds.
* Vygotsky investigated how child development and learning was guided by social interactions with parents and others, through which the child learns the cultural habits of mind, speech patterns, written language, and symbols.
** The response of the part of the motor system that controls the involuntary activity of smooth muscle fibers, the heart muscles, and glands (which secrete hormones).